The Faithful Departed Quotes

“But why would Catholics defend an anti-Catholic tradition? In part because they had ceased to identify with their faith; by the 1980s, to identify oneself as Catholic in Boston was to give an ethnic rather than a religious description. The voters who identified themselves as Catholics were telling pollsters something about their backgrounds but not necessarily their beliefs. The fashionable trend, for well over a generation, had been for Catholics to leave their religious backgrounds behind. By 1986 a majority had done so.”
― Philip F. Lawler, The Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston's Catholic Culture